by seanhunter
2 subcomments
- My uncle was part of the team in Bank of America implementing new ATM software at the time they moved to somewhat customizing the interface so it had a quick button on the first menu to give you your favourite withdrawal amount quickly, let you choose what notes you wanted etc. He said it was written in java and his favourite bit was writing the method that would be called (after all checks were done to make sure you had the money etc) to issue the cash. It was called “dispenseWithoutQuestion()”.
You could call dispenseWithoutQuestion(someamount) and the device would spit that amount of cash out so it was obviously tremendously pleasing to test.
- Many years ago, I worked on a project in Tennessee where the bank was installing computers in their branches (previously the tellers were using mainframe terminals). At the same time, they were consolidating the leased data lines to the branches to save money, as everything there was now a network device - including the ATMs.
The IBM representative on our team was working behind the through-the-wall ATM, routing some wires when a customer walked up (you could see them via the camera). Being a prankster, he started talking to her in a robotic voice: "Please insert card", "Please choose a transaction", etc. After a few of these he couldn't hold back any further and started laughing. The customer got the joke and started laughing too: "I knew someone was back there!"
Briefly, he was their first (and only) talking ATM.
- I remember the first ATMs I used back in the late 1970s. They were IBM machines with a red LED display, single-line, in a fairly heavily armoured, tiltable (to take into account people's different heights) slot.
These days we have big, full-colour LCD displays, without armouring. In Lincolnshire UK, where I live thieves just pull the whole ATM out of wall with a (stolen) JCB digger and take it away to be cut open at their leisure. That is if they can find one, of course. For both thief and bank customer ATMs are becoming increasingly rare - though not as rare perhaps as brick-and-mortar bank branches.
- This is worth reading for the line "For some reason difficult to divine the radioactive ATM card did not catch on." alone.
- Decades ago I worked on an ATM that "recycled" money. It did not only had the usual boxes of banknotes that were filled by the bank, but it also accepted deposits. Usually deposits are put in an envelope by the client and an envelope is stored in the machine; this makes reconciliation easy, since a bank employee opens the envelope, counts the money, and confirms the deposit transaction.
But on this ATM, people would deposit their banknotes directly. The machine would recognize and count them, crediting the correct amount to the person's account. And later, when someone wanted to get money out of the ATM, the machine would use these exact banknotes!
It was an innovative design, which saved the bank a lot of money (in ATM-caring trips) and provided people with a real service, since they could use the ATM longer, instead of getting error messages that it was out of cash (well, it never said that it was something more generic like "problem in operation").
As one can imagine, it was an interesting challenge designing the software and thinking of all the tests covering what might go wrong...
- No mention of Walter Wriston and First National City Bank (later Citicorp)? Wriston is sometimes credited with the concept of networked ATMs, in the sense that he as an executive pushed the project forward.[1] He scaled up the technology, flooding New York City with ATMs. Then everybody else in banking had to install them.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/21/obituaries/walter-b-wrist...
- In Japan, Omron developed early ATMs that looked similar to American and European machines. Though those early forms have changed significantly over time, Omron remains a top maker today (their ATM division later became a joint venture with Hitachi, so the Omron name is no longer used).
Unlike IBM, Omron specializes in ATM hardware, not bank internal systems. That difference in focus could have mattered.
- I'm on mobile so I can't check but damn the Univers font really calls back to the pleasant reading experiences of 70s technical documentation.
by shablulman
0 subcomment
- [dead]
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